Friday, November 18, 2016

[Securities and Exchange Commission] Chairman Mary Jo White . . . suggested the SEC would propose a new rule requiring companies “to include in their proxy statements more meaningful board diversity disclosures on their board members and nominees.” She also left the door open to having the rule specifically define what diversity means. These developments should trouble businesses that simply want to hire the best people.

Activists such as Aaron Dhir, a professor at York University’s Osgood Hall Law School in Toronto, have urged that companies be compelled to consider “the socio-demographic composition of their boards”—that is, directors’ sex and ethnicities, not their diversity of experience. At the very least, firms could be forced to explain why they refuse to enforce quotas in the boardroom. These aren’t only the ideas of an obscure professor. Rep.Carolyn Maloney (D., N.Y.) has been pressuring the SEC to force companies to identify “each board nominee’s gender, race, and ethnicity.”

Rep. Maloney, using her position as ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets, had the Government Accountability Office draw up a report on corporate boards. The report, which appeared last year, cited research showing that “the broader range of perspectives represented in diverse groups require individuals to work harder to come to a consensus, which can lead to better decisions.”

But “the broader range of perspectives represented in diverse groups” is a racist statement. As Peter Schwartz observes in The Racism of “Diversity”:

Unlike the valid policy of racial integration, “diversity” propagates all the evils inherent in racism. According to its proponents, we need “diversity” in order to be exposed to new perspectives on life. . . . They imply that people have worthwhile views to express because of their ethnicity, and that 'diversity' enables us to encounter “black ideas,” “Hispanic ideas,” etc. What could be more repulsively racist than that? This is exactly the premise held by the South’s slave-owners and by the Nazis’ Storm Troopers. They too believed that an individual’s thoughts and actions are determined by his racial heritage.

There is no doubt in my mind that many champions of “diversity” are well-meaning. But it is equally without doubt to me that Leftist intellectual leaders invented the diversity movement as part of the drive to replace America’s individualist foundation with collectivism, as a precondition to their authoritarian designs. It’s a moral travesty that, half a century after Martin Luther King urged us to judge each other on the content of our character rather than the color of our skin, the "diversity" movement is openly propagating the primacy of ethnicity as the standard by which to judge people.

I believe that behind the “diversity” crusade is the Left’s goal of a socialist dictatorship. To achieve full socialism, you first have to destroy the American ideal of individualism—the idea that the individual’s life belongs to him, to be lived as he sees fit—and orient Americans around collectivism—the idea that the individual is subordinate to the group. The easiest way to instill collectivism is to condition Americans to classify people according to irrelevant and uncontrollable genetic groupings like gender or race.

Note that meaningful human diversity—the rich diversity of uniquely individual attributes—is brushed off as irrelevant. Yet in a free society it is these individual attributes—attributes like intelligence, ability, ambition, moral character, values, goals, experience, and personal circumstances—that allows each individual to flourish as much as those attributes will carry him. The natural result is a wide disparity of individual outcomes, not equality. If the diversity crusaders really valued diversity, they’d be crusaders for the economic and political freedom that allows the rich individual human diversity to flourish. Instead, they trivialize individual achievement and wage war on income and economic inequality, the natural result of diversity in a free society.

The Left has defined diversity around a racial narrative for a reason. It’s goes deeper than racism. A society that values individual diversity will never go for socialism. A society that values the group or collective over the individual as the standard of moral value is primed for socialist authoritarianism in one form or another.

About Me

Greetings and welcome to my blog. My name is Michael A. (Mike) LaFerrara. I sometimes use the pen or "screen" name "Mike Zemack" or "Zemack" in online activism, such as posted comments on articles. “Zemack” stands for the first letters of the names of my six grandchildren. I was born in 1949 in New Jersey, U.S.A., where I retired from a career in the plumbing, building controls, and construction industries, and still reside with my wife of 45 years. The purpose of my blog is the discussion of a wide range of topics relating to human events from the perspective of Objectivism, the philosophy of reason, rational self-interest, and Americanism originated by Ayn Rand.

As Rand observed: “The professional intellectual is the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the philosopher.” I am certainly not the philosopher. But neither am I a field agent, or general. I am a foot soldier in that Objectivist army that fights for an individualist society in which every person can live in dignified sovereignty, by his own reasoned judgment, for his own sake, in that state of peaceful coexistence with his fellow man that only capitalist political and economic freedom can provide. While I am a fully committed Objectivist, my opinions are based on my own understanding of Objectivism, and should not be taken as definitive “Objectivist positions.” For the full story of my journey toward Objectivism, see my Introduction.

One final introductory note: I strongly recommend Philosophy, Who Needs it, which highlights the inescapable importance of philosophy in every individual's life. I can be reached at mal.atlas@comcast.net. Thanks, Mike LaFerrara.

Recommended Essays/Videos

Quotes I Like

Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it. Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.—Francisco d'Anconia

I love getting older...I get to grow up and learn things. Madalyn, 5 years old, Montesorri student, and my grand-daughter

The best thing one can do for the poor is to not become one of them. Author Unknown

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. Francis Bacon

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. Ronald Reagan

Thinking is hard work. If it weren't, more people would do it. Henry Ford

Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries. Ayn Rand